


Smashing

by januaryjune



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Episode: s03e14 Alter Ego, F/M, John Hughes in space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:33:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23845261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/januaryjune/pseuds/januaryjune
Summary: Tom Paris, turning everything into a joke including himself.A summary of "Alter Ego" from B'Elanna's perspective.
Relationships: Tom Paris/B'Elanna Torres
Comments: 35
Kudos: 44





	1. Pre-Luau

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyArreya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyArreya/gifts).



> I'm not convinced that I have anything new to contribute to the lexicon, but I really do love this episode. It feels like a John Hughes movie in space. The luau is prom. B'Elanna is our Klingon Molly Ringwald. For LadyArreya, who first suggested I do a take on this one.

It started with a series of encounters in Engineering. Boys, as it turns out, are weird. Boys stuck in a glorified Starfleet petri dish roughly seventy thousand light years from the majority of women they’ve ever met are a lot weirder. 

Tom Paris was first. He sauntered through the doors at 0900, armed with his helm report and those sparkling blue eyes that he fixed on her while she was busy testing one of the coolant injectors for minute leaks. She stood up straight as he approached, wiped her hands on her pants, and accepted the PADD. He beamed at her and didn’t leave. 

“How are you?”

“Just fabulous, thanks. What are you smiling about?”

“Can’t a guy smile at the chief engineer?”

“Preferably not.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t _want_ to be nice to Tom. It was more like she couldn’t be nice to Tom without noticing how much she liked his hands, how tall he was, and how he was probably the best-looking guy on the ship if you didn’t count Freddy Bristow, who was almost _too_ pretty and lacked Tom’s charm and sense of humor. She couldn't avoid thinking about what it might be like if they were together. If he'd drive her crazy-- if he'd be kind to her-- if he ever stopped talking, even in _certain_ moments.

She couldn’t be nice to Tom without thinking about touching him, and how he was so close that she could smell his aftershave. Without noticing the way he looked at her, and without wondering whether she could trust it-- whether she could trust _him_ \-- whether she really wanted to know the answer to that. The list went on and on. Better to keep him at arm’s length. Literally.

“You going to the luau?” he asked.

B’Elanna flushed red and cleared her throat. 

The general consensus was that _everyone_ was going to the luau, though she couldn’t blame Tom for wondering because she’d usually be the first person to find some kind of pressing issue in Engineering to use as an excuse. But after two full years in the Delta Quadrant, the crew had started to become aware of their own collective closeness, and she found herself wanting to be included in ways that she’d never expected.

She could tell that Tom felt much the same way.

“I’m going.” 

“Want to walk with me?”

He didn’t say _go_ with me, which was good but also strange. B’Elanna put her hands on her hips, acutely aware that Nicoletti was making her Tom-Paris-is-speaking sour expression behind her console and that Vorik had walked by twice trying to look busy when he wasn’t.

“Thought you had a date with Harry.”

“We could swing by and pick him up. We could all be dates.”

Oh _that_ wouldn’t start any rumors.

Then, suddenly, her mouth was moving without permission. B’Elanna, who had gamely rejected him when he invited her to the holodeck, then twice when he’d invited her to dinner, and who had, only yesterday, made a pretty good joke about his impulse control in an informal staff meeting (which caused Tom to mutter _wouldn’tyouliketoknow_ and Captain Janeway to say affectionately, “You two are always sparring,” which caused both of them to turn red), said:

“Sure. Meet you at 1530?”

Tom looked so pleased that B’Elanna practically had to bite the inside of her mouth to keep from smiling back at him. She wasn’t ready to give him that level of satisfaction.

Twenty minutes after he left, Harry Kim himself appeared, looking forlorn and flustered as he mumbled something about a malfunction at ops and started running tests at the computer. B’Elanna went over to see if he needed any help, and it was obvious he wasn’t feeling conversational.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, the way you might placate a little kid who dropped his ice cream and was trying to act like he didn’t care.

“Nothing! Why would you think something was wrong?”

She blinked at him, trying not to be amused. “I’m going to meet up with you and Tom before the luau if that’s okay with you.”

Harry shrugged. “I’m not going. Will you tell Tom for me? I’m just really busy.”

B’Elanna sighed audibly. A good friend would investigate this. A good friend would try and persuade Harry to change his mind, or indulge his sad puppy dog eyes with more questions, or otherwise push through his amateur attempt at putting up an emotional wall (B’Elanna’s two major areas of expertise were warp mechanics and emotional walls).

But she could only stand there frozen with the realization that this meant she and Tom Paris would walk into the holodeck together. Just the two of them. He would do something stupid like hold her hand. And with the way everyone on this damn ship clung to any salacious gossip they could find to stave off the monotony, by tomorrow morning, they’d be Voyager-married. This was all happening at warp 10, and she’d have to stop it. 

She wasn’t ready to give any of them that level of satisfaction.

Twenty minutes after Harry rushed out again, she went to oversee Vorik, who was going over the sensor readings from the inversion nebula. Vorik was Vulcan. Vorik didn’t suck at emotional walls. Vorik was safe! Vorik was professional. Vorik was… acting really, really weird.

“I was given the impression that the captain desired everyone on the crew to attend Mr. Neelix’s festivities. But I wasn’t aware that a _date_ was required.”

“I don’t think it is,” she shrugged.

“But you are attending with Mr. Paris, correct?”

“What? No!” she said, a little more forcefully than she intended. She swerved away from the console and regarded him seriously. “Tom and I are friends. We were going to meet up with Harry, but he just canceled.”

“Ah,” said Vorik. He was completely unreadable. “I apologize for such a personal assumption, Lieutenant. The complicated social relationships of this crew sometimes confuse me.”

“Me too,” B’Elanna agreed. In fact, it was quite an understatement. Then she had a bright idea. “Vorik, do you want to meet up with us instead? 1600 hours?”

For a Vulcan, he actually did look pleased. “That would be agreeable. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

She smiled, convinced she had done a good deed. Maybe Vorik’s emotional control would rub off on her.

\--------------------

B’Elanna Torres was a singularly brilliant woman. A prodigious engineer who spent half her life in a jeffries tube or wedged under a console, dissecting the insides of ships and shuttles. And she was terrifying. Men twice her size got out of her way when they saw her coming. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t occasionally stare at herself in the mirror, put on lipstick, and wonder if she was really as pretty as she felt. 

The strappy dress, patterned with pink coral, fit snugly over her breasts and cinched at the waist. She tilted her head at her own reflection and imagined how her mother would shake her head if she could see her now. She looked almost delicate. So completely _un_ Klingon. She liked herself this way. But of course, it was mostly a disguise.

She slipped on her shoes and left to find Tom, who was standing outside the turbolift when the doors opened. When she’d met him briefly in the Maquis, he used to enrage her with the way he looked every woman up and down as if he were shopping, and she was reminded of that for a moment when she saw his face as he looked at her now. But it wasn’t the same. He was softer and more vulnerable somehow, like the sight of her in that dress was more than he’d prepared for. She saw a surge of feeling in his eyes for a split second, and it struck a bell in her chest that she wasn’t prepared for either. 

“Lieutenant! You look positively--”

“Tropical?”

“More along the lines of smashing.”

 _Smashing_. She’d heard plenty of his old-fashioned complimentary platitudes before, but that was a new one.

Then he put his warm hand on her shoulder and started telling her about his tacky Hawaiian shirt. For a moment, she understood Tom Paris and his need to deflect by talking too much-- his need to get people to laugh at him so that they wouldn’t actually notice him. 

She tossed out that she’d managed to replace Harry with Vorik at the last minute, and she realized she should have predicted his reaction. Tom would frown and not be able to resist this dilemma. She was a little crestfallen that he was leaving (that aftershave scent seemed to follow him), but the way he always went after Harry was sort of endearing. Tom dealt with emotional walls by clumsily barreling them down in a way that was hard to ignore. 

“You’re pretty confident about your powers of persuasion,” she told him.

He turned back, and this time his expression was unmistakable. Pointed. Flirtatious.“Yes I am.”

She’d done so well at keeping her guard up, but when he disappeared into the turbolift, there was nobody else around. B’Elanna decided it was okay to take a moment to smile to herself, hard, and feel that secret, almost _girlish_ rush. She walked right into that one.


	2. Luau

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've ingested so much fic in the past few months that I am worried there is another AE story with a bonfire and I'm stealing it without realizing. So if that's true I swear it wasn't on purpose!

Vorik spent less than a nanosecond considering Tom’s absence before he launched into a list of (probably) rehearsed conversational topics on the way to the luau - first, the inversion nebula, then Neelix’s menu, then whether malfunctions in the anodyne relays on Deck Four could at least partially cause a glitch in the replicators on Deck Two or if that was statistically improbable. By the time they arrived at the holodeck, he had rushed through them too quickly and landed on talking about one of his sisters, who was a geologist. B’Elanna actually found this sort of interesting.

“So she’s a big fan of rocks.”

“Rocks can be fascinating.”

No argument there.

The crowd at the luau was just starting to swell, and she really could spot just about everyone hanging around the tables or dancing to the soft Polynesian melodies, except for the diehard skeleton crew who were keeping the ship running while everyone else had fruity cocktails.

Nobody seemed to think twice about her arriving with Vorik at her side, judging by the way Nicoletti greeted them like they were all sharing the same embarrassment and Ayala came over to say hello without a hint of teasing in his voice. She was a little offended-- why couldn’t she be having a torrid affair with her Vulcan engineering buddy just as easily as she might be with Tom Paris? 

_Maybe they just don’t care what you do, Torres_ , she told herself.

It was sort of nice, the collective embarrassment. The Polynesian hologram women handed out leis. The masked men in their patterned skirts held trays of drinks in pineapples. She felt a strange kind of sympathy for herself and everyone else - the Voyager crew, throwing themselves adorable little photonic parties to forget that they were marooned in distant space. 

All the men wore Hawaiian shirts, and all the women wore the same exceedingly tropical, flared-skirt dresses that she had. She was sure Tom had helped with the wardrobe suggestions, and she made a mental note to ask him later even if he would probably go on about it for much longer than necessary. If she was going to listen to boys talk too much, they could at least have pretty blue eyes.

A minute later, she turned to her left and there was a dubious-looking (and covered in pineapples) Harry Kim. Tom couldn’t be far off.

“So you made it after all,” she said to Harry.

“Uh yeah. Tom wouldn’t exactly take no for an answer.”

B’Elanna smiled and patted his shoulder. “I’m not surprised.”

Harry immediately seemed distracted, looking past her to the veranda where one of the program characters - a pretty blonde resort instructor named Marayna - was chatting with a few of the male ensigns. B’Elanna recognized Freddy Bristow, who had only recently, finally, stopped trying to get her to go out with him on a real date, not just let her kick his ass in Parrises squares. She was kind of sad that he’d moved on. She’d never had any real interest in him, but she grew to kind of like that everyone knew that he liked her, even if that was a terrible, secret thing that people didn’t admit. She liked that Tom knew, and that it bothered him.

Harry was staring at Marayna.

“If you want to go over there, I’m sure Tom won’t mind,” B’Elanna said plaintively. Marayna had broken away from the crowd of admirers and gone to sit by herself.

“What?” said Harry, as if he’d just remembered she was there. “Over where?”

B’Elanna just shook her head at him.

“I didn’t think Tuvok would come,” he said suddenly, and B’Elanna followed his gaze to where Voyager’s chief tactical officer was chatting with Captain Janeway and Chakotay. Was that really so unusual?

“I think I’ll say… hi.”

He disappeared. She gave a puzzled glance to Vorik, but he wasn’t exactly the most attuned to this kind of thing.

A moment later, Tom appeared, having swept up a pair of pineapple cocktails. He handed her one and cheerily inserted himself between her and Vorik, not bothering to ask where Harry had gone. It all went well for a second - she dropped her hint by saying she was starving, and Tom instantly picked it up and assumed they would eat dinner together. But then there was Vorik. Vorik who had clearly been more interested in being here with her than in mingling, and who stepped across Tom’s space the way Tom had cut through his and practically demanded she eat with him instead. By the lakeside. Her stupid mouth.

“Good memory,” said Tom.

What was she supposed to do, exactly?

She couldn’t insist that she had to eat with Tom, and Vorik certainly wasn’t extending his invitation to him either. B’Elanna hoped, for a brief moment, that Tom himself would step in and rescue her somehow - _claim_ her - but he didn’t, and that was silly. She wasn’t about to have boys fighting over her attention. Tom wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t Kes. 

And so, to save face and avoid being anybody’s luau entertainment, she went with the Vulcan. There were plenty of other dramas to choose from.

\----------------------

The guilt was overwhelming. B’Elanna ate a plate of roast pig, something called poi, and macaroni salad (that was actually really good) and tried as best she could to make conversation with Vorik, or at least to keep up with whatever he was saying. He was a good kid (as she’d said to herself about Freddy a dozen times too), but honestly this was unfair. How could she be expected not to look back over her shoulder and try and spot Tom? 

When she finally did, he was standing by the tiki torches pretending to play a ukulele in the company of Pablo Baytart and Megan Delaney, and Megan was laughing and laughing, and B’Elanna decided that this was karma. This was what she deserved. 

The other thing was, even though nobody had cared that she arrived with Vorik, it was certainly an assumption now. She went for the ladies room, and Ensign Jetal, in the middle of fixing her earrings, said, “Are you and Vorik having a good time?” She went to say hello to Joe Carey, who was hanging out by the bar in his red Hawaiian shirt and yellow lei, and he said, “Why hasn’t Vorik danced with you yet?” 

B’Elanna hated assumptions. 

It didn’t _have_ to be Tom. She’d take Harry. Or Chakotay. Even Kes or Neelix. Anybody to come and save her. She saw Vorik waiting expectantly for her at the table, and she made up her mind to make some excuse for herself.

“I must say, Lieutenant, I had some initial reservations about this evening, but everything seems to have turned out better than expected.” Her Vulcan engineering buddy, resplendent in his own Hawaiian shirt and lei, was at least having a really good time. That’s when the guilt set in again. 

Salvation finally came in the form of Susan Nicoletti, who wandered over to them with a drink in her hand. “Chief, Vorik! A bunch of us are going down to the water, and there’s going to be a bonfire, do you want to come?”

Vorik stood up instantly. “Of course!”

B’Elanna, suddenly acutely aware of how much parties felt like Klingon military campaigns, decided to strategize. “I’m just going to grab another drink. I’ll be there in a minute.”

The luau had died down a bit after dinner, and it was clear that some of the less party animal-inclined officers (or people with early duty shifts) had said their goodbyes. She couldn’t even see Janeway, who had reportedly been a big proponent of the whole thing. 

B’Elanna had honestly (swear to Kahless) planned to make her escape and head back to her quarters, but when she ducked through to the empty palm-patterned sofas by the bar, she noticed Tom sitting there, with his ukulele that he couldn’t play. He strummed it three times at the sight of her and sang completely off-key.

“Kauai girl, are you lonely to-niiight? To be alone now just can’t be rii-iight. That golden moooon is shining for you! A Kauai boy might be lonely tooo.”

She took off her shoes and held them in one hand, shaking her head at him. But she laughed. “Don’t give up your day job, Paris.”

He grinned. “It’s a traditional Polynesian love song.”

“Let it never be said you’re not cultured.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she sat down next to him. The quiet electricity that passed between them made her shiver. But there was something else underneath. A sort of comfort. It made no sense at all, but sitting next to Tom Paris was sometimes the thing that made her feel like she wasn’t alone. 

“Where’s Vorik?”

She whipped her head to the side. “Where’s Megan?”

Tom raised his eyebrows at her and snorted. “Megan Delaney? Dunno.”

She cleared her throat again and regretted that she’d said anything.

“I think he went down to the water with everyone else, for the bonfire.”

Tom made a small noise and leaned back on the cushions. “I think he’s actually on the steps waiting for you and staring at us. Don’t look.”

B’Elanna sighed. Of course he was. 

A jumble of thoughts collided in her head, and part of her wanted to say them out loud, to ask Tom what he thought, even - why did she feel so _guilty_ for not playing Vorik’s date, as he so clearly wanted? Why did she care so much what people thought of her and what they might say, even when she insisted that she didn’t? Why was it so bad that she just wanted to sit on this tropical sofa with this impossibly handsome idiot who looked at her like she was an inversion nebula and would probably break her heart if given half the chance? Why couldn’t that just be _okay_?

But she never voiced these things. It wasn’t her way. She just stayed where she was, and that was enough.

“Too many people at this luau, right?” Tom finally said.

B’Elanna smirked. “Yeah. Way too many.”

He looked beyond her, and whether he was watching Vorik or the party, she couldn’t tell, but it was obvious he was deep in thought. Finally, he set down the ukulele and got to his feet, just as the sounds of their friends laughing on the edge of the lake grew almost as loud as the thrump-clang-ding of the band playing to a smaller crowd. “Should we go down there?”

“I think I’d rather call it a night.”

Tom nodded. “Well, I bailed on you before, let me walk you back.”

She was about to say no instinctively, but something made her hesitate, and she thought _why not_? She’d worried so much about arriving with Tom that she’d ended up spending half the night listening to Vorik talk about omicron particles and how he didn’t understand the point of birthday parties. And now here she was, leaving with Tom-- standing up with him and leaning on his forearm so she could put on her shoes. Once she’d steadied herself, she brushed her hand lightly down to his, and he caught it.

Oh, great. He’d gone and done the stupid thing.


	3. Post-Luau

B'Elanna knew there were pairs of eyes on them as Tom led her through the dissipating crowd and out into the hallway. She knew what it looked like. He still held her hand as they approached the turbolift, but he noticed her nervousness with an insight she didn’t think he was capable of. 

“You shouldn’t care what other people think so much.”

She scowled. “That’s easy for you to say.”

“Is it?”

It wasn’t a _sparring_ question. It was actually a bit sad. As she called for Deck Nine, she looked into his eyes, and her mouth twitched with guilt. He’d done so much in the past couple years to prove himself. He’d even saved them from the Kazon. And yet it was probably still hard for him to show up to the party and not wonder who had a hard time trusting him, because for as many people he had charmed, he rubbed at least as many the wrong way. She was best friends with Chakotay, she knew that he could get under someone’s skin. He even seemed to get under Vorik’s skin. And under her own. 

She changed the subject. “Harry didn’t seem like he was having a good time.”

“He’s high-strung, that guy.”

“Seemed like he had a thing for that holographic instructor - what’s her name?”

Tom just smiled softly as the turbolift whirred.

“You know, I kind of miss when he was talking about Libby,” he finally said.

“It’s probably better that he stopped.”

“Why do you say that? Cause she’s not going to wait seventy-five years?”

They stopped at her deck and stepped out into another quiet hallway. 

“Partly. But I guess it’s more like… it’s easy to love a perfect idea of someone when the real woman doesn’t have a chance to mess it up. People get way more appealing when they’re unattainable.”

Tom tilted his head and seemed to really consider her words, even as he couldn’t stop looking at her - up and down, not like he was shopping, but more like he was studying. She wanted to ask him what he was trying to figure out. 

“I’d rather have the real woman,” he said softly.

B’Elanna laughed incredulously, amazed by how much she consistently wanted to sleep with Tom Paris right up until he talked. Nicoletti was right. “Come on! There’s a holographic _bar wench_ at Sandrine’s who says differently. Harry’s like your protege. Even the Delaney sisters can’t compete with women who are imaginary, or in the 20th century, or just... taken.”

She rushed quickly to her door before Ensign Kaplan and her date, whose name B’Elanna could truly not remember, stopped to look at them. She knew she was being harsh, but all of the reasons she couldn’t invite him into her quarters came rushing in at once-- all the reasons she was scared of him and was probably right to be.

“Why are you mad at me?” asked Tom, once he caught up with her. His face wrinkled, and he seemed genuinely confused. He was good enough not to mention just how much attention she obviously paid to his highly bizarre love life. Maybe because he liked it.

“I’m not. Goodnight, see you at the briefing tomorrow.”

“B’Elanna, wait--”

Swish, swoosh, and she was inside. She paused in the darkness, just to make sure he had gone.

\---------------------

It seemed that even holographic women had men fighting over them on this ship. Yesterday, B’Elanna was thinking about how close everyone was. Today, she kind of wanted to murder them all. 

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. Her temper had been much worse in the past. In fact, she kept it positively cool when she was in Engineering trying to figure out why the ship wasn’t moving and Harry stopped listening to her altogether. She even sent him on a break because he was starting to weird her out. 

Maybe Vulcans were right about emotions. Vorik, at least, was a consummate trooper, ready to bounce off her every theory and pretend the luau had never happened. Indeed, you’d think they’d never spoken to each other outside of their duty shifts with how completely reliable and unchanged he was at all times.

On this boat full of raging hormones and misdirected stir-craziness (including her own), B’Elanna really appreciated that.

She thought about it again at the briefing, when they discussed the fact that Marayna was not a hologram at all-- or at least, not exactly (B’Elanna wasn’t sure if this made her more impressive or less). She marveled at the way Tuvok calmly spoke of her being in love with him while Harry grew increasingly despondent on the other side of the table. It must suck to have feelings for a Vulcan, but they were great to have around when you wanted to keep things totally professional. 

She’d sat down next to Tom, and he nodded at her pleasantly, without a trace of resentment for the way the previous night had ended. She knew by the way he generally bristled and didn’t make jokes that he was probably not in the best mood (since when did she feel so familiar with his moods?), but then neither was she. He was good at letting things go too, especially when there was a problem to solve. 

Janeway sent them to the holodeck with Tuvok, saying she wanted the problem solved one way or another. They kept looking at each other warily in the turbolift, like they were both regretting their knowledge of holoprogramming right now. The doors swished open. 

“You know,” she said, approaching the holodeck panel with the two men behind her, “Trashing this place might be cathartic, but I’m not sure it would solve anything.”

“You have a better idea?” Tom asked.

“”It would help to actually know what we’re dealing with.”

Tuvok was right. Those doors opened way too easily.

Inside, the program seemed to be eroding without any help despite all indications that it was working perfectly. When the resort staff attacked them, B’Elanna knew her earlier assessment was right. Still, she’d managed to discover that Marayna, whoever or whatever she was, had originated from a ship other than Voyager. Whether that was worth getting strangled by a smiling lei girl while Tom got bashed in the face with a plate of fruit and Tuvok fended off tiki torch-wielding kidnappers was another story. 

The world seemed as dim as the holodeck as they headed back to the Bridge, and B’Elanna couldn’t stop coughing. Tom and Tuvok didn’t stop supporting her until she’d practically made it to her station. 

In the end, Tuvok had to confront Marayna on his own and keep her from igniting the plasma fires that would destroy the ship. When they got word from the transport room that he’d succeeded and that Voyager was suddenly free to resume course, B’Elanna glanced at Harry. She stole a moment and went over to his station to look at the sensors.

“You alright?” she whispered. 

“Yeah. She liked Tuvok because he sees himself as alone, you know?”

“What’s that mean?”

Harry shrugged. “It means I’m not alone. That can’t be a bad thing.”

She smiled and gently squeezed his arm.

Tom set in a course to take the ship away from the inversion nebula. They’d escaped with minimal damage. Nothing that couldn’t be repaired.

\----------------------

Before the end of a very long shift, the captain asked B’Elanna and Tom to brave the creepiness of Holodeck One again and check to make sure the resort program had survived. The characters were gone for now, and when they stood on the veranda and looked out onto the lake the water tended to crackle and fade in and out of existence. The Delta Quadrant had really done a number on their pretty photonic getaway.

“We can patch it up,” Tom said with a shrug. “Neelix will be throwing parties here again in no time.”

B’Elanna looked around at the deserted courtyard - empty bottles, smashed papaya, toppled plants, and flickering light fixtures. Rather than think about what putting it back together would entail, she sat down on one of the deck chairs. After a minute, he sat down next to her.

“Did you hear about Talent Night?” she asked.

Tom snickered and nodded. “Oh yeah. If the luau wasn’t awkward enough for you, we now present… Voyager Talent Night! Thanks, Neelix.”

“Funny,” said B’Elanna. “I kind of thought you’d be into it.”

“Maybe I just don’t have any talents.”

She stared at him for a moment, her lips pursed to keep from laughing. Surely, he wasn’t setting that one up. It was too easy, even for him.

He narrowed his eyes, finally conceding. “Okay, no talents I can perform onstage anyway…”

“Uh huh.”

“In front of the captain…”

“Don’t keep going, Paris.”

It was nice to take a break, right up until the silence settled in and they realized how close to each other they were.

They stood up again in unison and continued to rummage among the mess of the luau. Tom started arranging the overturned chairs, and B’Elanna checked behind the bar, where she found a ukulele inexplicably wedged between the margarita mix and the too-warm basket of limes. She pulled it out and went over to Tom, where she could hand it to him.

“Here you go,” she said. “You still have time to practice.”

He laughed appreciatively and took it in one hand. “You know, I don’t know if Neelix researched Polynesian culture as much as he said.”

He still had that little gash on his chin from the scuffle with the holograms here earlier, and his hair and uniform looked mussed in a way he hadn’t bothered to correct. He picked up one of the flower crowns from the lei girls (which had somehow been discarded in a potted plant) and put it on his head, lopsided. He held the instrument ready to play and beamed at her. Tom Paris, turning everything into a joke including himself. She felt a rush for him. That bell in her chest. His stupid eyes.

“How do I look?” he asked.

She paused, then said, with meaning. “Smashing.”

A flash of surprise, but then he smiled warmly.

This time, B’Elanna smiled back.


End file.
